Saturday, September 3, 2016

The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972)

If you watch enough Fred
Williamson movies, you begin to forget how potent he was in his prime,
simply because so many of the pictures that he produced and/or directed himself
are unspeakably bad. That’s the context for my experience of The Legend of Nigger Charley, a decent
B-picture likely consigned to obscurity because of its title. As directed by
Martin Goldman, the film has a familiar storyline and a serviceable vibe, so it
neither breaks new ground nor soars with artistry. That said, it has a bit of an edge, because the title character is a slave
who becomes a folk hero by killing the white man who callously destroyed the
slave’s emancipation papers. Circumstances transform the slave into a gunslinger, and he inspires awe from frontier types
who’ve never seen a black man control of his own destiny.

The picture
opens in Africa, with punchy black-and-white scenes showing a baby and his
family being ripped from their ancestral home amid a flurry of bloodshed. Cut
to twentysomething years later, and the baby has grown into Charley
(Williamson), a muscular blacksmith working on a Southern plantation. The
plantation’s dying master offers to grant his favorite slave, Theo (Gertrude Jeannette),
her freedom, but she asks for the favor to be given to her son, Charley,
instead. Before Charley can leave, he gets into a quarrel with the
master’s heir, leading to the man’s death. That’s how Charley becomes a
fugitive, and he takes his friend, house slave Toby (D’Urville Martin), with
him. Eventually, their gang grows in size and stature until they’re hired by
farmers to protect them from an evil preacher who runs a protection racket. The movie’s narrative gets fuzzy soon after Charley leaves the plantation—every act has a new villain, and the story never loops back to
pay off threads from the vibrant opening scenes—and the
wandering-avenger theme is trite. By the end of the picture, the Charley
character has become so generic he could be played by, say, Lee Van Cleef. Yet
every so often, the folks behind The
Legend of Nigger Charley remember what makes this material unique, so, for
instance, there’s a terrific scene with an old eccentric named Shadow (Thomas
Anderson), who storms into a bar where Charley’s gang is under siege just so he
can say he’s seen everything. Although a direct sequel called The Soul of Nigger Charley followed in
1973, Williamson’s 1975 flick Boss Nigger
tells a separate story. As others have noted, The Legend of Nigger Charley was likely among the inspirations for Quentin
Tarantino’s violent hit Django Unchained
(2012), another story about a slaved-turned-gunslinger.